Following his brief career with the New York Yankees, Jim Bouton went on to write “Ball Four,” a book that forever changed the way we look at baseball.
Jim Bouton never came close to making the Baseball Hall Of Fame. In fact, he won twenty games only once in his career. He was left exposed by the New York Yankees in the 1969 expansion draft and selected by the (then) Seattle Pilots. He finished his career with an unremarkable 62-63 record.
And yet, Bouton, with a few pen strokes changed the way we look at the sport and, in particular, the men who play the game. He would be reviled as a snitch, an anarchist, and a traitor by his own peers. But, Bouton loved baseball, and he never meant to hurt anyone.
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After “Ball Four” many years later, he would author another book he titled “I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally”. Perhaps, he said it best himself in the last sentence of his history-making best seller.
“You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end, it turns out that it was the other way around all the time”. In fact, he loved the game and missed it so much that he would continue to play and pitch even as he approached the age of 50.”
“You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out it was the other way around all the time”
More than anything, Bouton took the game out of the realm of fantasy and made it real for us to see from the outside looking in.
By and large, the men who played pro ball prior to and during the era Bouton played were not drafted out of college or even high school and given substantial bonuses. The players themselves were mostly working stiffs who used whatever talent to make up for the lack of education by playing a game better than anyone in their neighborhoods.
They never expected to get rich and negotiated one-year contracts for themselves that placed them in the middle class of America. They worked off-season jobs selling insurance and driving trucks. Those fortunate enough to play on those great Yankees teams during the 1950’s looked forward to and needed those World Series checks every year.
For the most part, Bouton fit that mold. But early on, he also displayed a good sense of the business side of baseball that stayed with him even to this day. While playing in a Chicago amateur league during the summer of 1958, he pitched two great games in the league tournament, and suddenly professional scouts were coming around and asking him to work out. George Bouton wrote a letter to all 16 major-league teams telling them his son was planning to sign a contract by Thanksgiving, advising them to places their bids. The New York Yankees’ Art Stewart offered $30,000, and the Boutons signed late summer. The rest, as they say, is history.
Bouton made it to the Yankees in 1962 finishing with a mediocre 7-7 record. The next year proved to be a breakthrough season as he soared to a 21-win league-leading season. On September 13, his shutout over the Minnesota Twins clinched the Yankees’ fourth straight pennant. He started the third game of the World Series in Los Angeles, matching zeros with a future Hall Of Famer but lost 1-0 to Don Drysdale. The Yankees fell to the Dodgers in a four-game sweep.
Bouton was a tremendous competitor throughout his career, famous for throwing so hard he often lost his cap after releasing the pitch. Asked about his competitiveness in 1965, he said, “I would smash into a second baseman to break up a double play, or do anything I possibly could to win.” The sportswriter Maury Allen gave Bouton his enduring nickname, Bulldog.
But coinciding with the social upheaval during the 1960’s, he was often asked his opinions about the Vietnam War or about civil rights. Unlike most of his colleagues, Bouton would answer directly and honestly. He was good copy but becoming less popular with his teammates and management as his personality seeped through his image as a player.
“After two or three years of playing with guys like Mantle and Maris,” Bouton later wrote, “I was no longer awed. I started to look at those guys as people and I didn’t like what I saw. They were fine as baseball heroes. As men though, they were not quite so successful. At the same time I guess I started to rub a lot of people the wrong way. Instead of being a funny rookie, I was a veteran wise guy. I reached the point where I would argue to support my opinion and that didn’t go down too well either.”
Bouton’s tenure with Seattle was marked by playing with a very poor team and trying to regain the ability to get major league hitters out. Adding to his growing reputation as a knucklehead, he worked on developing a knuckleball. It was out of sheer boredom that he turned to taking notes and speaking into a cassette recorder during nights in a hotel somewhere in America where the idea for “Ball Four” was born.
For Bouton, it was not good copy to gloss over the truth (as he witnessed it). Hence, it was not surprising that acrimony followed when the book went into publication in the spring of 1970.
The first excerpts were published by Look Magazine in May 1970 and caused a firestorm within the game. Former and current teammates, other players and baseball writers around the major leagues, as well as management, were outraged about his stories in regards to ballplayers’ drug use and sexual hijinks.
Bouton was hauled before Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who publicly admonished the pitcher. He later credited Kuhn for helping book sales.
For fans like myself, the book was an eye-opening revelation about the game and the men who played it. It wasn’t like these things went unnoticed. It was more that they were never talked or written about. Sports writers provided a cover up. To this day, they would still be insisting that Joe DiMaggio was the greatest living person of his time and not the aloof prima donna everyone actually knew him to be behind the scenes.
Ultimately, the league forgave but never forgot. Even the stoic Yankees invited Bouton back (finally) for a long-awaited appearance at their annual Old Timers Day celebration in 2001, leading to an emotional reunion with his fans, his old ballpark and many former teammates. He faced just one batter, and to the delight of the crowd, got his cap to fall off on his first pitch.
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Bouton and Rob Nelson, a teammate in the late 1970s with the Portland Mavericks, developed a product called Big League Chew, shredded bubble gum designed to look like chewing tobacco, a popular vice among ballplayers. They sold the idea to Wrigley. And 30 years later, the gum still sold well. Bouton invented and sold a few other ideas, including personalized baseball cards for fans.
Like all others in this series, Bouton paved his own way both in and out of baseball. Most of all, he changed baseball journalism and sports writing in particular forever. All in all, pretty good for a guy with a 62-63 career record in professional baseball.
Special thanks to Mark Amour for providing quotes and some background details.
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